The last piece included in this endlessly readable George Orwell collection of critical essays is Reflections on Gandhi; opening with the exquisite line: Saints should always be judged guilty until proven innocent. Such a line provokes the reader to re-examine their view and reconsider their perspective.
As does the first piece in All Art Is Propaganda entitled Charles Dickens, from a 1940 collection of essays, Inside The Whale, proposing the possibility that Charles Dickens knew little or nothing about the poor and working class in England.
Orwell asks his readers to consider the fact, that while obviously a great writer, Dickens' ignorance is clear to anyone who examines closely the unsavory, degenerate and illiterate characters mined from the working class as portrayed in his novels; while the intellectual heroes are almost always of the middle and upper classes. Thus explaining the apparent appeal of Dickens, as the only working class hero the upper crust champions.
Film: Hitler/Chaplin
Because most of Orwell's work was written during the rise and reign of Adolph Hitler, much of his critical consideration of an artist's work is weighted heavily with a weather eye toward how that work bears witness to the atrocities being waged throughout Europe. Most interestingly in dissecting Charlie Chaplin's The Great Dictator, which Orwell nails as a great piece of political satire, albeit an unfunny one, accentuating the uncanny resemblance between Chaplin and Hitler.
While most critics (including Orwell) at the time focused on Chaplin's inability to translate from silent films to talkies; Orwell more astutely points out Chaplin's downfall, glaringly obvious in The Great Dictator, lies more in his inability to expand his storytelling from short films to full length features.
Salvador Dali, Spanish Psycho
One of the most riveting and compelling essays in All Art Is Propaganda is Benefit of Clergy: Some Notes on Salvador Dali. This review of Dali's autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali, seeks to investigate the authenticity of a book that claims to be the true story of how a man who is clearly psychotic could excel and succeed as one of the most influential artists of the early 20th century.
Some 60 years before this century's obsession with the memoir took hold, and cracks in the myth of fingerprints began to show, George Orwell stated in no uncertain terms that any true story or biography or memoir must be taken with a grain of salt. The scenes from Dali's autobiography as described by Orwell are absolutely incredible; the artist claims when he was a child he violently kicked his infant sister, which induced extreme pleasure in Dali; there are stories of his flirtation with necrophilia, torture, misogyny, and masochism. The book comes off like the crib notes for Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho.
Confessions of a Book Reviewer
During his lifetime, George Orwell was known mostly as an essayist and cultural critic. The irony of Confessions of a Book Reviewer, one of the final pieces in this collection, lies in the beautifully rendered detail and novelistic descriptions of the day in the life of a writer/poet/novelist/screenwriter, paying the bills by writing book reviews. Orwell couldn't have known (or could he) that one day the novels he wrote near the end of his life, Animal Farm and 1984 would truly be his legacy, and his essays would be mostly forgotten. Reading Confessions of a Book Reviewer, is to be in the room while George Orwell sits typing before a mirror, a literary self-portrait.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 13, 2008
ISBN-10: 0151013551
ISBN-13: 978-0151013555
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